This morning I got an email whose subject line said, "I told you so." It was from a former colleague at WebMediaBrands, back when it was called internet.com and we both wrote about stocks, IPOs and such.

I replied that he'd have to refresh my memory, as the psychic impact of "I told you so" had been deadened by 15 years of marriage.

He responded, "That the Time-Warner AOL merger didn't make sense and wouldn't last."

He was right, of course. As reported on InternetNews.com, Time Warner is preparing to "shed its online division."

Time Warner on Thursday made official plans to separate its AOL division sometime around the end of this year, a widely expected move that sheds one of the media company's weakest divisions.

Time Warner (NYSE: TXW), which for months has signaled such a plan was in the works, said the deal has been approved by the board and would be structured as tax-free to its stockholders. It still needs regulatory approval.

Once completed, the deal would once again make AOL an independent, publicly traded company, and close the door on a massive merger between the two media companies in 2000 that critics say failed to live up to its promise.

The unit was once how most people found their way onto the Internet. It has since been left behind as a relic as cable and phone companies picked off subscribers and Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) and others swooped in to dominate online advertising.

But back when the merger first was announced in January 2000, Time Warner's acquisition of the then Internet superstar triggered endless speculation about what it all meant for the future of media convergence.

As it turns out, not a whole lot. Media convergence has occurred regardless of AOL Time Warner, and in retrospect the anti-trust hearings held that summer to debate whether the merged company posed a monopoly threat to other media players seem almost comically unnecessary.

Still, things looked a bit different back then, just months before the Internet bubble began bursting. Here's one "expert":

The potential power of these merged assets makes previous "mega-mergers" such as Excite and @Home seem puny in comparison. AOL brings to the marriage the most popular Internet service in the world. Besides high-speed cable access, Time Warner's holdings include the HBO cable channel, Time magazine, the Warner Bros. movie studio, Warner Music Group and Time Warner Cable.

Potential power, indeed. And look at those assets! But they never gelled with the online business, not enough to matter. There were too many other ways (YouTube) users could access rich media, among other things. (BTW, the "expert" quoted above is me. My analysis of the deal wasn't as bad as I feared, though I hardly was a skeptic.)

I also found a very interesting transcript of a Jim Lehrer NewsHour panel discussion held the day the deal was announced. Participants were Jim Ledbetter, New York bureau chief for the Industry Standard; Bruce Leichtman, director of media and entertainment strategies at the Yankee group; David Bennahum, partner in an Internet venture capital firm; and Norman Solomon, syndicated columnist and author. Here are some quotes from each (remember, this was a different era):

Ledbetter: [The merger] makes sense from a strategic perspective, and of course, it also creates a globally powerful company that combines both old media power and content with new media speed.

Leichtman: I see that the torch has been passed to a new generation, and the new generation is the Internet. And that's where the opportunity lies in increased revenue beyond the 10 to 15% that Time Warner is currently making.

Bennahum: What we're seeing here essentially is the maturation of the Internet as the platform for what will be the 21st century entertainment media universe. And what we've seen in this deal is not merely the conglomeration of some technology with some media, but essentially first shot across the bow of the 21st century media landscape.

Solomon: I think primarily what's in it for the public is a narrowing of choices under the illusion of having more diversity. I'm afraid that we may look back on January 2000 as the time when de facto, the World Wide Web became essentially the world narrow Web, which is counterintuitive because there's all this talk today, all this smoke being blown about how AOL and Time Warner will create these multiplicity of choices through the new media. The reality is, however, that these new media are being used to herd and goad and leverage the consumers, the media consumers into essentially cul-de-sacs where the links in these various new media are self-referential, not often labeled as such.

Now that the free-for-all surrounding the latest Supreme Court nomination officially has begun, we in the tech community can stand safely off to the side and assess Judge Sonia Sotomayor's record on technology cases.

Fortunately Kenneth Corbin of InternetNews.com has done a bit of digging for an article published today:

Since 1998, Sotomayor has been a judge on the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, where she has ruled on several Internet-related cases, including a contract dispute brought against the Web browser Netscape and its corporate parent AOL.

In the 2002 Specht v. Netscape Communications Corp. case (PDF), Sotomayor denied Netscape's request for arbitration following a district court ruling that a free browser download plug-in failed to supply reasonable notice about collecting users' data by burying the terms of service far down the screen on a linked page.

"We agree with the district court that a reasonably prudent Internet user in circumstances such as these would not have known or learned of the existence of the license terms before responding to defendants' invitation to download the free software, and that defendants therefore did not provide reasonable notice of the license terms," Sotomayor wrote.

Actually, this doesn't strike me as a particularly tech-oriented case. It's really about contract law and sequence of notification as the determinant of responsibility.

Then there's this:

While serving as a judge on the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, Sotomayor ruled in a case brought against the New York Times involving the licensing of freelancers' work to electronic databases.

In Tasini v. New York Times, Sotomayor ruled in 1997 that publishers were within their rights under the Copyright Act to license back issues containing freelancers' articles to electronic databases like LexisNexis.

Sotomayor's ruling in the publishers' favor was reversed on appeal. The case made it to the Supreme Court, which sided with the freelancers and upheld the appeal ruling by a 7-2 decision in 2001.

This case is about who owns and should benefit from content. This area of law as it applies to the Internet continues to evolve, so it'll be interesting to see how Sotomayor's rulings evolve. Also, Tasini was heard 12 years ago, during the early days of the commercial Internet. I wonder if Sotomayor's decision would be any different today.

It's doubtful tech issues will come up during the Senate Judiciary hearings, not when much more interesting topics such as Sotomayor's alleged racism and relentless judicial activism compete for sound bites. Who knows, maybe in a weak moment one of the senators will ask a substantive question about technology. We can only hope.

By Tom Dunlap

Iran has re-friended Facebook and Twitter, it was reported today.

Social networking sites are apparently playing a big role in the upcoming Iranian elections, with tens of thousands of Iranians using Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other sites. One of the candidates challenging President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the reform-minded Mir-Hossein Mousavi, has even launched his own YouTube channel.

All that free expression of ideas and candidate support, however, didn't sit well with some in Iran. But there was an important update today.

The L.A. Times' man in Beirut, Borzou Daragahi, reported the following today:

Iran unblocked the popular Facebook social networking website just days after it was banned, an Iranian news agency is reporting.

A report published today on the website of the Iranian Labor News Agency, or ILNA, said Facebook was now accessible for ordinary Web surfers.

The rescinding of the ban came a day after Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad denied he was behind the decision to block the site, which has been used by his challengers to rally supporters for upcoming elections.

Reformist challenger Mir-Hossein Mousavi, a former prime minister, had become especially adept at using Facebook to generate buzz for his campaign.

According to the tersely worded ILNA report, the site has been blocked and unblocked numerous times over the last few days.

A committee comprising representatives of the Interior Ministry, intelligence services, judiciary branch and parliament decides on which sites are to be blocked, according to ILNA.

More than a third of Iranians use the Internet, according to the Internet World Stats market research site.

It continues to amaze how social networks have changed elections, both in the U.S. and abroad. It's worth watching to see if the social network hordes can wrest control of the country from Ahmadinejad.

On Tuesday and Wednesday I blogged about the Web 3.0 show this week in New York City. For those readers who don't often visit internet.com's Semantic Web site, I wanted to share some other descriptions about and comments from the show.

Here's Aza Raskin, head of user experience at Mozilla Labs, during his keynote (as reported by Semantic Web's Jenny Zaino):

The Web isn't about destinations anymore, one expert said at the Web 3.0 Conference here today.

"The business model of the web where [the goal] is to get people to come and view your site -- we are moving away from that," said Raskin. "It's a little bit scary."

But how to turn fear into a force that draws profit from a world where the emphasis is going to instead be on helping users map intentions to action? Raskin put the focus on the "verbs" of the web -- like mashups.

"In Web 3.0 nouns will get very small, and we'll need a lot of 'verbs' to do something with them," he said. "It’s a huge shift in thinking, that as the 'nouns' get smaller, our interconnectedness, or verbs, has to go up."

The business model, he says, is going to come in facilitating that interconnectedness, in delivering the services that turn content into nouns, nouns into verbs, and then map that all back to content again.

Here's Edmund Wong, writing in the blog at iCrossing, a digital marketing agency:

Despite how useful Google is, we still have to do a lot of search queries to find what we are looking for, usually employing lots of tabbed browsers to compare lots of information sources, and then copy and paste that info into one place.

Wolfram Alpha, which just launched, is a major step forward towards Web 3.0. It seeks to anticipate what type of information or analysis you seek. It's not just about tagging content so you can find it. People compare it to Google, but it's not really a search engine, but a computational engine.

Tom Tague, opening keynoter (again reported by Jenny Zaino):

"The hard message [to the publishing industry] is there will be winners and losers," Tague, Calais Initiative Lead at Thomson Reuters, told the audience. Spending is not moving from print to online media anymore: "There's only one pie. It's a zero sum game, and the pie is getting smaller."

Calais' mission, Tague says, is to enable the winners in the sector. If you want to be among them, you had better move fast to:

Automate/semi-automate workflow

Improve audience development

Enhance content

My takeaway from the event is that economic adversity is accelerating the demand for new ways to monetize content. And while the slow rollout of semantic technology over the past 10 years has raised unflattering comparisons to artificial intelligence (which failed to live up to expectations), there seems to be a much sharper focus on the business case for Web 3.0 now than there was last June, when I attended the Linked Data conference in New York. That event was a geekfest compared to this show, which focused far less on ontologies and more on improving ROI.

Based on what I heard in my two days at the Web 3.0 show, our Internet experience five years from now will be markedly different than the current one. I'm looking forward to it.
 

There's nothing like pending doom to motivate you.

For years most online publishers adopted an incremental approach to technology adoption, often waiting to see what competitors were doing before committing to any direction. But now, as the online advertising business has imploded, incrementalism is being replaced by urgency.

At a Web 3.0 panel in New York City, Tim Musgrove, founder and CEO of TextDigger, explained why his company has picked up more media clients this year than last.

"Their pain is driving them to be our customers," Musgrove said. "They are in such financial pain" that they need to explore better ways to leverage their content.

TextDigger offers clients a number of semantic web tools designed to help make their Web pages more findable via both external search (Google, Yahoo, etc.) and within the client site. TextDigger says this can increase inbound traffic, extend visitor sessions and grow revenue.

Of course, selling the top media brass on the need for more effective search tools is one thing. Getting ego-driven journalists to buy in is something else.

"There's a great level of hubris in newsrooms" that made some media customers initially resistant to intelligent automation technology, Musgrove said. Hubris in the media? Ya think?

First the bad news: If your company is in the online content business, there's a two in three chance that it won't survive.

Now the good news: Emerging tools can help content creators and publishers be among the fortunate one-third.  But not if you're a follower.

That was the message delivered this morning by Thomas Tague of Thomson Reuters in the opening keynote of this week's Web 3.0 conference in New York City. Tague, who leads Thomson Reuters Calais Initiative, focused his talk on monetizing content in today's dismal advertising environment.

Whether you call it semantic technology, linked data or Web 3.0, the point of these tools is to make web or site searches more relevant and meaningful to the user. But Tague said the real value of structured search to organizations ultimately comes in three areas: cutting costs, increasing revenue and increasing competitiveness.

"Fundamentally the mission of semantic technologies is to get value out of content," he told the audience in a packed ballroom at the New Yorker Hotel.

Part of that value will come from organizing the vast quantity of online content generated not just by commercial content providers, but by users through a wealth of Web 2.0 tools that revolutionized Internet publishing by making it vastly more interactive.

"Web 3.0 is about cleaning the mess we made and harvesting the value we created with Web 2.0," Tague said.

He lamented the long rollout of semantic technologies without commercial benefits. "It's been 10 years now and we're not seeing the range of business applications we expected to see," he said. Tague, however, thinks that is changing quickly, in large part due to a sense of urgency brought on by the collapse of online advertising revenue in the past year.

What content providers must do now, he said, is use semantic technology to:

• Reduce costs by making workflow more efficient
• Improve metadata tagging to take advantage of Google's recently released "Rich Snippets," which allows Google to provide more detailed and compelling search returns. This will enhance the user experience, thus increasing engagement.

By Tom Dunlap

Like a lot of guys I know who work from home, I'm my house's IT support guy. Which is a scary thing, because, like many things in life, I pretend to know more than I do.

I can defrag a hard drive, swap out a battery, download and install software (usually), run a spyware sweep, get a wireless network going (oh wait, I recently had a huge problem with that, had to get the young neighbor guy over), and a few other things. I even wrote a book about Sony laptops earlier this decade, "How to do Everything with Your Sony VAIO."

But when I have to start unscrewing panels on the bottom of laptops I get nervous. I can be a bit of a bull-in-the-china-shop kind of guy.

I was sweating bullets the first time I had to swap out a laptop's hard drive. What if I bend some of those little tiny gold spikes into which the hard drive snugly fits? What if I drop one of those tiny screws into the guts of the laptop?

Anyway, the issue now is random access memory (RAM). My wife's laptop has a serious RAM deficiency. It's beyond slow, in layman's terms. I knew that her shiny new HP Compaq laptop, running the memory-sucking Vista, should've been more souped up when we bought it 6 months ago at Best Buy. But it was on sale, and I didn't think it would be this slow. I didn't listen to that little voice in my head. Now my wife says she feels like she's back on dial up.

I know I could research the kind of RAM module she needs, how much she currently has, then buy it and install it myself -- which I've never done. I've heard it's a cinch to install RAM. Heck, there are undoubtedly YouTube how-to videos. But there's a little voice in my head again, and this time it's saying: Don't do it. Put down the tiny screwdriver, if I can actually find that one. I recently snapped one of those opening something (refer to "bull-in-china-shop" kind of guy.)

At the same time, there's another tech issue in the house. I'm dealing with a parental-control snafu on my 6th-grade son's Titanium PowerBook. I installed a parental-control program called Safe Eyes a while back, but either I didn't set it up correctly, or it's been monkeyed with. And when I say monkeyed with, I mean that, after I got it working, I tried to make adjustments so my son could get on iTunes and I messed up the settings. And I'm NOT a Mac-head. I'm finding it a pain to get back into the Safe Eyes program to tighten things up.

After many frustrated attempts to open the program -- Safe Eyes was making me crossed eyed -- and curses directed toward 1 Infinite Loop in Cupertino, I finally took the blasted machine to the best computer shop in these parts, Dave's Computer Services in Santa Cruz.

If any of you Apple types out there have parental control advice for an older Mac (running 10.4.11, whatever particular jungle animal that OS is called) please drop me a line. I DO know that the latest Mac OS has built-in parental controls, but I'm not sure this older laptop has the juice to run Tiger, Leopard, Giraffe, Orangutan -- whatever catchy little name has been bestowed upon the newish OS.
 
I was contemplating my laptop struggles this morning while catching up on the news, when I saw a relevant thread on Slashdot, called, "The Hard Drive Is Inside the Computer," which refers to a blog on itWire.
 
The thread is good read (although geeky at times), especially if you're mired in another household IT support quagmire.

By Tom Dunlap

If you were going to plan a conference on the world of Web 3.0, aka the Semantic Web, next week would be a good week. Good timing, with all the recent news.

Well, timing is indeed everything. My company, WebMediaBrands, is holding such a conference. The Web 3.0 Conference will go down Tuesday and Wednesday at the New Yorker Hotel in New York. Click here for more info. Seats are still available.

The big search/Web 3.0 news this week came from Google. The search behemoth is finally supporting a couple of key standards. As SemanticWeb.com's Jennifer Zaino reported:

Google has added a host of new features to its leading platform -- and support for semantic web technologies is among them. It is supporting the open standards RDFa and microformats as part of its new Rich Snippets feature for annotating meaning within search results.

... With Rich Snippets, preview text for Google search results grow richer by the inclusion of new metadata that can make it more efficient to search for reviews, people, and the like. For example, users searching for a particular person can get better insight into facts about that individual to ensure they click on the right link the first time -- among a host of Mary Smiths, for instance, you can key in on the one that works in San Francisco, for a particular company when the appropriate metadata has been tied to her professional profile on a directory like Linked In.
Webmasters who begin using RDFa or microformats to add these tags are not only going to help Google improve its search results, the company says, but are taking a big step to making the Internet smarter.

The news caused a huge splash in the search and Semantic Web ponds, and the ripples are only starting. The definitive analysis of this news so far comes from Tim O'Reilly, who writes:

There's a long-time debate between those who advocate for  semantic markup, and those who believe that  machine learning will eventually get us to the holy grail of a Semantic Web, one in which computer programs actually understand the meaning of what they see and read. Google has of course been the great proof point of the power of machine learning algorithms.

Earlier this week, Google made a nod to the other side of the debate, introducing a feature that they call "Rich Snippets." Basically, if you mark up pages with certain  microformats ( and soon, with  RDFa), Google will take this data into account, and will provide enhanced snippets in the search results.

... Rich snippets could be a turning point for the Semantic Web, since, for the first time, they create a powerful economic motivation for semantic markup. Google has told us that rich snippets significantly enhance click-through rates. That means that anyone who has been doing SEO is now going to have to add microformats and RDFa to their toolkit.

In other news, Wolfram Alpha, the brand new search engine -- or "computation engine" -- that introduces a totally new way to search the web, launches tonight. The service is trying to avoid inflated expectations. But it is a compelling new approach to finding information and making sense of it, as Adam Ostrow explained in his recent review.

How big will either the Google support or the Wolram technology be? Search me. Check back soon for more details.  

From the Wall Street Journal (and the We Really Hope It's True Dept.):

After reducing their budgets sharply for months, many businesses across the U.S. have stopped slashing information-technology spending, a shift that could stem revenue declines at tech companies, including Hewlett-Packard Co. and Cisco Systems Inc.

The WSJ cited Forrester Research data showing corporate tech spending increasing 13% in 2007 and 8% in 2008, with spending expected to drop 3% this year. But, WSJ reporter Ben Worthen writes, "interviews with more than a dozen chief information officers and corporate technology executives who oversee tech spending indicate that a range of U.S. businesses have finished cutting."

The stabilization doesn't mean the good times are back in tech. While spending may have hit a bottom, the executives say they don't intend to boost their budgets again until after their businesses and the economy as a whole have shown stability for several quarters. For 2010, they anticipate tech budgets that are mainly flat.

"I don't think that we'll see the [spending] levels that we saw three or four years ago," says Catherine Brune, the chief information officer at insurer Allstate Corp., whose $1 billion tech budget has been flat for the last year and will most likely remain so into 2010.

But for now, she says, "I'm not hearing the panic that I was six to nine months ago."

That's good because, face it, panic generally is a bad thing. It leads to markets selloffs, bank runs, rash business decisions and legally questionable practices. Worse, panic feeds on itself. Of course, panic is the mirror image of irrational exuberance, which -- as we've learned the hard way -- can lead to market run-ups, wasteful spending, rash business decisions and legally questionable practices. Irrational exuberance also feeds on itself.

Maybe it's not as exciting, but give me level-headed and sober-minded any day. But first, give me a recovery.

By Tom Dunlap

Whatever you think of Twitter -- either you realize it's a great tool for spreading/acquiring information, or you see it as a huge waste of time -- it's hard to argue with the numbers.

The microblogging phenomenon continues to surge. As the site Paidcontent.com reported today:

This is what the "Oprah impact," Ashton Kutcher's followers race with CNN, and non-stop coverage from tech and media blogs amounts to: Twitter actually surpassed both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal for unique visits in April.

This news followed a huge month in March, when unique Twitter visitors skyrocketed in the U.S., according to one tracking site. ComScore estimated that unique visitors to Twitter.com grew 131 percent between February and March to 9.3 million visitors. Not only did Twitter more than double the number of people that go to its site in a single month, but it accelerated its growth from the 55 percent rate it experienced in February. These numbers do not include international visitors, nor do they include all the usage on desktop and mobile clients, which is significant in Twitter's case.

Many news organizations are watching Twitter closely. Tomorrow, the New York Times will announce a new up-to-the-minute view of all its stories called Timeswire, linked to from the front page of the site. A press release for that product stated, "Think Twitter & Facebook redesign."

As for us at WebMediaBrands (the recently renamed Jupitermedia), we find Twitter very useful and can see why unique visitors are surging. Follow me on Twitter here, and my colleague Chris Nerney here. 

I think it's fair to say that most of us have a love-hate relationship with wireless. We love the flexibility it provides, but constantly are disappointed by spotty connectivity and often glacial data transfer.

There's light at the end of the wireless tunnel, according to InternetNews.com:

A new alliance of tech heavyweights hopes to launch of a new generation of ultra high-speed wireless devices and connectivity that promises to be as much as 10 times faster than today's Wi-Fi wireless standard.

The WiGig Alliance says it expects to deliver final specifications and certification requirements for the new 60GHz wireless technologies by the end of this year. The first devices and systems to take advantage of the higher-speed network could be released as soon as next year.

"Whether anyone can build and deploy in 2010 is up to the individual companies, but the goal is to set up an infrastructure that can be enabled in that time frame," Mark Grodzinsky, a marketing executive with the WiGig Alliance, told InternetNews.com. "It wouldn't surprise me to see the first products out next year."

WiGig, whose 15 members include Intel (NASDAQ: INTC), Dell (NYSE: DELL), NEC, Nokia, Samsung, Broadcom (NASDAQ: BRCM), Panasonic and Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) unveiled its plans on Friday. The group is focusing on enabling indoor networks to operate at gigabit-per-second speeds.

One question the WiGig initiative raises concerns the future of Wi-Fi.

"There years from now I see tri-band Wi-Fi products on the market in massive deployments," Grodzinsky said. "There are some limitations to WiGig where Wi-Fi does a better job, whole home coverage for example."

The Wi-Fi industry's own advocacy group, the Wi-Fi Alliance, was also conciliatory in comments on the WiGig announcement.

"Wi-Fi and the proposed technology now in development by the WiGig Alliance seem complementary," said Kelly Davis-Felner, marketing director of the Wi-Fi Alliance, in an e-mail sent to InternetNews.com. "Wi-Fi will remain the worldwide choice for high-speed networking around homes, enterprises and hotspots. WiGig may emerge as a technology for specific in-room technologies."

WiGig, Wi-Fi, I don't care. Like most people, I just want faster and more reliable wireless service. However we get there and whatever we call it matters little. Let's just arrive, preferably ahead of schedule.

It's exciting that Twitter plans to extend its already impressive search function beyond the text of Twitter posts (or "tweets"). The rapidly growing microblogging service "will soon begin to crawl the links included in tweets and begin to index the content of those pages," CNET's Rafe Needleman explains:

This will make Twitter Search a much more complete index of what's happening in real time on the Web and make it an even more credible competitor to Google Search for people looking for very timely content.

Sure sounds like it. But here's where I begin to worry:

Twitter Search will also get a "reputation" ranking system soon, (Twitter vice president Santosh) Jayaram told me. When you do a search on a "trending" topic--a topic that is so big it gets its own link in the Twitter.com sidebar--Twitter will take into account the reputation of the person who wrote each tweet and rank the search results in part based on that.

Jayaram did not say precisely how reputation will be calculated; he indicated that engineers are still figuring that out. But this, again, will make Twitter Search more valuable.

The concern here, of course, is that every time Robert Scoble, Kevin Rose or Guy Kawasaki weigh in on a trending topic -- which they will, and frequently -- their pearls of wisdom (or shallow observations) will float to the top of every search. And thus the power and influence of that small circle of Twitterati will be reinforced. (If Oprah and Ashton Kutcher start showing up on Page 1 of the new, improved Twitter trend searches, someone please come and kill me.)

I'll reserve judgment until I see the new Twitter search service in action, but I can't say I'm overly optimistic about the ranking system.

Tough economic times aren't always tough on everyone. There are companies and sectors that benefit from recessions and downturns as struggling businesses search for ways to cut costs and adapt business models.

Among the sectors serving the IT world that are doing well in this economy are web-based business software. From internetnews.com:

Gartner Research now expects 2009 sales of so-called cloud-based software to grow 22 percent to a record $8 billion, a touch higher than before, the firm said on Tuesday.

"We are still going strong," said Gartner analyst Sharon Mertz, who advises IT managers on software purchases. "The model is pretty solid, even in these tight economic times."

This puts pressure on established software companies such as Microsoft, IBM, Oracle and SAP to play catch-up, after standing on the sidelines for most of the past decade as Salesforce (NYSE: CRM) and others gained credibility with corporate clients.

Providers of cloud-based software and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) host the technology in their own data centers, allowing customers to access it via ordinary Web browsers. That saves clients the cost of buying licenses in advance and running programs on their own computers.

Thus, SaaS sales have outperformed traditional software as the economy worsened. "It has low cost and low risk," said Rebecca Wettemann, an analyst with Nucleus Research, which helps IT managers evaluate software programs.

For me the real question is whether web-based business software will continue to flourish even when the economy rebounds. I believe enterprises have an innate desire to host their own data, but if the web-based model proves to be sufficiently secure and less costly, many more companies may be willing to abandon the old model.

It's not every day that you hear of web software that "could change the Internet forever" -- unless, of course, part of your job is to take phone calls from web software vendor marketing executives.

Still, this article in Sunday's Independent newspaper caught my eye because of my interest in the evolution of search technology. It's about Wolfram Alpha, a new Internet search engine that promises to give users definitive answers to specific questions, rather than pages of links from which the sought-after information might be found (which is what we get from Google now). Independent writer Andrew Johnson adds:

[I]t will also produce a neat page of related information – all properly sourced – such as geographical location and nearby towns, and other mountains, complete with graphs and charts.

The real innovation, however, is in its ability to work things out "on the fly," according to its British inventor, Dr Stephen Wolfram. If you ask it to compare the height of Mount Everest to the length of the Golden Gate Bridge, it will tell you. Or ask what the weather was like in London on the day John F. Kennedy was assassinated, it will cross-check and provide the answer. Ask it about D sharp major, it will play the scale. Type in "10 flips for four heads" and it will guess that you need to know the probability of coin-tossing. If you want to know when the next solar eclipse over Chicago is, or the exact current location of the International Space Station, it can work it out.

Dr Wolfram, an award-winning physicist who is based in America, added that the information is "curated", meaning it is assessed first by experts. This means that the weaknesses of sites such as Wikipedia, where doubts are cast on the information because anyone can contribute, are taken out. It is based on his best-selling Mathematica software, a standard tool for scientists, engineers and academics for crunching complex maths.

I wonder what the implications of Wolfram Alpha are for the ubiquitous "ego search." Maybe you find out what people really think of you. Already there's a downside.

More importantly, the article had me wondering how -- or if -- Wolfram Alpha bore any relationship to Semantic Web technology, for which we've dedicated a Web site and conference. The Independent article doesn't address this, but I found an article on TechCrunch from Nova Spivak, CEO of Radar Networks, that does. Spivak wrote his piece after spending two hours talking to Wolfram and viewing demonstrations of the new search engine. Some excerpts:

There is no reason that one MUST use the Semantic Web stack to build something like Wolfram Alpha. In fact, in my opinion it would be far too difficult to try to explicitly represent everything Wolfram Alpha knows and can compute using OWL ontologies. It is too wide a range of human knowledge and giant OWL ontologies are just too difficult to build and curate.

It would of course at some point be beneficial to integrate with the Semantic Web so that the knowledge in Wolfram Alpha could be accessed, linked with, and reasoned with, by other semantic applications on the Web, and perhaps to make it easier to pull knowledge in from outside as well. In this area, the standards of the Semantic Web could be quite useful to the project. However for the internal knowledge representation and reasoning that takes places in the system, it appears Wolfram has found a pragmatic and efficient representation of his own, and I don't think he needs the Semantic Web at that level. It seems to be doing just fine without it.

What I glean from this is that Wolfram Alpha and the Semantic Web are two different animals that could work together, but don't necessarily need to at the moment. (If someone else has a different interpretation, by all means leave a comment.) It will be interesting to see how this plays out.